From WAVES to front lines

Thursday

Jan 31, 2013 at 6:00 AM

Albert B. Southwick

The announcement that women will be allowed in combat gave me pause. Not that I am opposed to the idea, but it set me to thinking and remembering.

Seventy-odd years ago, shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, I was in Navy basic training at Newport, R.I. Following that, I went through commando training with the Marines, and then through the most rigorous of all, training for naval aviators at Dallas and Pensacola.

The thought of women.sharing any of that with us would have produced lewd comments but little else. It would have been inconceivable.

U.S. women in uniform — an estimated 350,000 — played a big part in World War II. The woman who would become my first wife, Shirley Johnson of Holden, enlisted with the second contingent of women called up by the Navy, known as WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service).

Unlike World War I, when women did mostly clerical and office work, the WWII Waves (and women in the other services) trained for all kinds of specialties — mechanics, communications, intelligence, etc. Shirley became a link trainer instructor. Link trainers were cockpit mockups on the ground in which trainers simulated flight conditions and taught navigation, maneuvers, etc., to fledging pilots like me.

By the end of the war, 27,000 women had joined the WAVES.

But actual, violent, bloody combat was something else. For one thing, we probably doubted that women were physically able to meet the exhaustive rigors and challenges. For example, one of the requirements in the Navy aviation training syllabus was to run a mile in six minutes. That doesn’t sound like much today, but then it was a real challenge and some of the trainees couldn’t make it. I doubt that many women at that time could.

The same went for the other rigors of training — crawling with disassembled machine guns under barbed wire barricades, scaling walls with full 50-pound packs, etc. And those were just training maneuvers, not actual combat.

But ancients like me have to adjust our thinking about women and their capabilities. I suspect that a well-conditioned woman today can do all the physical stuff that we did 70 years ago, including the six-minute mile. Many women have already distinguished themselves in hazardous duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some have paid with their lives. There is no reason to doubt their dedication, bravery and ability.

Combat duty would open up dozens of military careers to women. It would mean that a determined woman could fix her sights on a goal all the way to the top — general or admiral.

What would be the downside of that change?

One is the sheer filthy brutality of combat — well described in an article by Ryan Smith in The Wall Street Journal. He recounts the actual infantry combat conditions that he experienced in the first Gulf War. Jammed aboard an amphibious assault vehicle, the 15 Marines “were forced to sit, in full gear, on each others’ laps, or in contorted positions for hours on end. That was the least of our problems … Many Marines developed dysentery from the complete lack of sanitary conditions. When an uncontrollable urge hit a Marine, he would be forced to stand, as best he could, hold an MRE bag up to his rear and defecate inches away from his seated comrade’s face.”

It’s hard to imagine a female functioning effectively in such a situation.

I have never undergone anything quite like that, but I have been in any number of situations where bodily functions were done under conditions that would have been more difficult if women were around.

I never went through the rigors of ground combat because I was a flier. We spent hours on patrol searching for Nazi submarines. Women certainly could have been trained to do the kind of piloting and navigation that we did in 1943-44 on our patrol flights searching for German submarines. But even there adjustments would have been needed. Some of those flights were up to eight hours long. Sanitary arrangements on our PBYs and PB4Y-2s were primitive.

You would never have mistaken us for Air Force One.

I mention this because the handling of human waste can be a problem for men in combat. It would be somewhat more complicated if women were involved. Of course, adaptations can and should be made. But despite the new ruling about women in combat, I suspect that not many women will elect to do the some of the grungiest jobs.

But what do I know? I’m 92 years old, 70-plus years removed from World War II.

PBYs? PB4Y2s? I might as well be talking about bows and arrows.

If women want to volunteer for infantry combat duty and can meet the physical requirements, I say OK. And I think my late wife would agree.